Holland Carter, New York Times: "Sexuality in Modernism", December 10, 2010
Copyright New York TImes.
Excerpts:
WASHINGTON — With the exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” one of our federally funded museums, the National Portrait Gallery, here in the city of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” has gone where our big private museums apparently dare not tread, deep into the history of art by and about gay artists.
Over the last few years there has been plenty of speculation as to how this show would shape up, and when a copy of the catalog arrived, I felt a bit let down. All the artists were well known — stars — as was most of the work. The whole enterprise looked like an exercise in Hall of Fame-building, rather than like an effort to chip away at the very idea of hierarchy and exclusion. We were getting a “pride” display, an old model, very multicultural 1980s.
Then, when the Catholic League and several members of Congress demanded the removal of a piece — a video by David Wojnarowicz (pronounced voy-nah-ROH-vitch) that included an image of ants crawling on a crucifix — and the gallery, which is part of the Smithsonian, said O.K., we really were in the 1980s, back in the culture wars. Which led me to understand the show in a somewhat different way.
. . .
What is great is the sight of work by one of American modernism’s most influential power couples, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Both men maintained a long silence about their lives together as partners in the 1950s and ’60s. But here they are, side by side, each represented by work from that time incorporating photographic self-portraits. Rauschenberg died in 2008. That Mr. Johns agreed to have work here is a quiet confirmation of the growing cultural willingness to acknowledge gay identity.
In part, AIDS is responsible for that. It yanked everybody awake, pushed gayness and queerness out of a subcultural closet and fully into the public realm. “Hide/Seek” stands as evidence that they have stayed there. And, despite the inclusion of some recent work, the show really ends with AIDS-era art: an unfinished Keith Haring painting, a Félix González-Torres candy spill, and Jerome Caja’s portrait of a friend painted with a mixture of nail polish and cremation ashes.
The Wojnarowicz video, “A Fire in My Belly,” belonged in this group. It was made in the late 1980s in response to a lover’s death and after the discovery of the artist’s own H.I.V. And crucial elements missing from much of the exhibition — personal and political anger, formal rawness, overt spirituality — are embodied in that work. In a sense the video was missing even when it was here: it was edited down for the occasion to barely 4 minutes from 20. But to have removed it entirely because of ideological strong-arming was to violate the premise and the promise of the show: difference was sent back into hiding.
It is way past time for mainstream art history to acknowledge the shaping role of sexual difference in modern art. And “Hide/Seek,” with its many strengths, begins to do so in a persuasively accessible way. Equally important is the need to assess the price that acceptance into history, and into the world, on mainstream terms may exact.
Wojnarowicz believed, as have many artists, that the outsider position is a valuable one, and with difference comes responsibilities, resistance to acceptance at any cost being one. The absence of a sense of that resistance in the show is what disappointed me when I first saw the catalog. It deepened with the removal of the video. And it stays with me still.
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